The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. For  ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies,  which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning  the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and  accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be  submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct  method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular  epoch.